The Truffle Kid

Supplying fine food in a town where money is no object.

Brett Ottolenghi prides himself on the fulfillment of outrageous and obscure demands.

Illustration by Floc’h

“From New Mexico? That’s awesome. Mmm-hmm. O.K. Just put them in my mailbox,” Brett Ottolenghi said, into a cell phone, as he paced the cobblestoned plaza in front of a squat old church in the village of La Alberca, in Salamanca, Spain. Ottolenghi, who is twenty-five and slight, with a perpetually worried look, gave a Las Vegas address. Then he removed the phone from his ear, and explained, “Chef Alex”—Alessandro Stratta, the chef at Alex and at Stratta, two fine-dining restaurants at the Wynn casino in Las Vegas—“asked me a while ago to find him pink pine nuts. This guy just found some for me in New Mexico. He’s in the tortilla business. My driver ran into him at the airport once and he gave us thirty pounds of dried chili peppers to try, but I’m not really in the chili-and-tortilla business. To give him a chance, I said, ‘There is one thing in your area I’m looking for.’ ”

Ottolenghi is the proprietor of Artisanal Foods, which supplies top Las Vegas chefs with foie gras, truffles, caviar, saffron, vinegars, cinnamon, oils, salts, and ham. He often says that he is on a first-name basis with three hundred and seventy chefs in Vegas—the executive chefs and sous-chefs and chefs de cuisine at Jean Georges Steakhouse, Le Cirque, Daniel Boulud, BarMasa, and dozens more—by which he may mean that he has forgotten their last names, or is not sure of the pronunciation. (Many are French.) To the chefs, he is “the truffle kid”—for his first product—or Hamleg, owing to his tendency to walk through casino lobbies carrying the hairy, hoof-on hindquarters of a pig. He specializes in the small run, the vaguely regulated, the hard to come by, and the near-banned—the medical marijuana of the food world. Among the many impostors in the business, he hunts for authenticity. Don’t get him started on what passes, in most people’s minds, for cinnamon: the great majority of it is mislabelled cassia. He gets the real thing from Sri Lanka.

Ottolenghi prides himself on the fulfillment of outrageous and obscure demands. He has sought purple mustard at the bidding of the chefs at Michael Mina at the Bellagio, and found beautiful huitlacoche—corn smut—on a thirteen-acre farm in Florida. At Chinese New Year, he furnished the buffet at the Bellagio with four hundred pounds of fatted duck breast on less than twenty-four hours’ notice. After the authorities forced Guy Savoy, a two-Michelin-star restaurant at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, to remove a popular guinea-hen-in-pig-bladder dish from its menu—the bladder was coming from an unapproved source—the restaurant turned to Ottolenghi. “They still get tons of requests for it, so they gave me the mission of trying to get domestic pig bladders,” he says. He called pig farms and slaughterhouses in four states. “I really exhausted every possibility. There’s no way to get a pig bladder in this country—they’re all ground up for dog food.”

A couple of years ago, Ludo Lefebvre, who was then cooking at a restaurant called Lavo, at the Palazzo, asked Ottolenghi for piment d’Espelette, a subtle chili pepper prized by chefs. Piment d’Espelette is rare; the zone de l’appellation, in southwestern France, is only a few thousand acres. In powder form, the pepper can wholesale for a hundred and ten dollars a pound. (Paprika is less than eight.) After initially working through an importer, Ottolenghi had decided to become one himself, making him, by his count, the third importer of piment d’Espelette to the United States. Last May, the day before he drove to La Alberca, he spent the afternoon in the tiny Basque town of Ainhoa, meeting a young farmer named Claire. He quizzed her about her production methods, and then submitted to a pepper tasting as she explained the properties she controlled for: color—rich, oxygenated red—and flavor, ideally a balance of fruitiness, toastiness, and foin, an aftertaste of hay.

He had come to La Alberca for the jamón. La Alberca is a pork-centric place, where the hanging limbs and loins of cured Ibérico pigs serve as decoration for the tapas bars, and, outside the church, there is a statue of a boar, like a local saint. La Alberca is home to Fermin, the only Spanish producer of Ibérico ham approved by the U.S.D.A. for sale in the United States; Ottolenghi is the exclusive source for Fermin products in Las Vegas.

Leaving Ainhoa that morning, Ottolenghi, an uncertain navigator, checked the map and, seeing that we would need to drive half the length of Spain, estimated that we’d arrive by midday. We passed dozens of small towns and scores of restaurants without stopping to eat; Ottolenghi is an ascetic foodie, often consuming little more than a kefir-and-raw-egg shake in a day. It was past four by the time we got to Fermin, an elegant plant on the outskirts of La Alberca, built in the mid-eighties to resemble the town’s medieval architecture: fieldstone facing, held in place by a loose lattice of half-timbers. Raúl Martín, a grandnephew of the founder, led us down to a basement dining hall with tiled floors and an open fireplace, where Luis, a jug-eared cook with a double chin, was grilling cuts of pig meat: tenderloin, pancetta, ribs, pluma (“feather,” or loin tip), presa (collar), and secreto, a cut hidden away between the ribs and the fat. Rich smoke filled the air.

Ibérico meat is unctuous—up to thirty-five per cent fat—and its most luxurious variety, bellota, melts at room temperature. Bellota pigs, which are released into the forest in the fall to hunt for acorns, are so oily that they are known as “olive trees with legs.” Last year, Fermin slaughtered only five thousand bellota pigs, for a total of ten thousand hams, ten thousand shoulders. The hams cure for three years; the shoulders, which are bonier, take at least two. Retail shops charge a hundred and thirty dollars a pound for the ham. Bellota is what sells in Las Vegas.

Martín showed the way to a long wooden table piled with breadbaskets and wine and trays of chorizo and salsichon. Javier, a Fermin employee, joined us, and they started to gossip about ham, as Luis brought over platter after platter of cooked meat and Ottolenghi stood at an iron jamonera, cutting thin slices of bellota for the group.

“We sent today a bellota to the royal palace, for the heads of state of Europe,” Javier said. Ottolenghi nodded, and told an equivalent story of Las Vegas royalty. Had the Spaniards heard of Cirque du Soleil? Yes, Martín said. “Every Christmas, Guy Laliberté, who started it, buys three bellota legs from Robuchon’s L’Atelier,” Ottolenghi reported.

The next morning, Martín showed Ottolenghi the room where the hams were cured—he called it “the bank”—and then took him to the breeding farm to see the Ibéricos alive. They had thick, black hides, like toy rhinos, and brayed mournfully as they rutted and fought. A farmworker handed Ottolenghi several acorns of the variety that the bellota gorge on in the forest. Seeing a marketing opportunity, he pocketed them. “I’ll bring these to my meetings to show the chefs,” he said.

Ottolenghi comes from mushroom people. His parents, Arturo and Hannah, seed the logs in their back yard in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with shiitakes; morels and chanterelles grow wild. Once, when the family was living in Ohio, before Brett was born and when his brother, Alex, was an infant, Arturo spotted out the car window a hardwood forest and suspected that it could be harboring chanterelles. He pulled over and found two solid acres of them. As Arturo tells it, “I picked a few, took them home, and called Chanterelle, in New York, and asked for the owner, Karen Waltuck. I said, ‘I know this sounds crazy, but I’m in Ohio and I have some fresh chanterelles—do you want five to ten pounds?’ She said, ‘Whatever you can ship. Anything I don’t use, my friends at Dean & DeLuca will use.’ Hannah and I parked Alex in a cradle with a mosquito net over it and packed up as many boxes as we could, took them to the airport, and that same evening all over lower Manhattan people were eating our chanterelles.”

On a family trip to San Francisco, when Brett was twelve, he ordered a pasta dish with truffle oil on it. This led to a conversation about the high price of truffles in the United States. At the time, there was only one major importer, Urbani, an old Italian company that still dominates the market. Brett decided to see if he could compete. He was already something of an entrepreneur. In second grade, he sold Pixy Stix and gourmet lollipops at school, in violation of campus rules, and was sent to the principal’s office. In seventh grade, he started importing laser pens from China for eleven dollars and selling them for twenty, and wound up in the principal’s office again.

Brett and Arturo started the Truffle Market, an online venture selling truffles that they imported from Italy, in 1998. (Arturo, who runs a business that provides sandpaper to body shops and woodworkers, has family in Piedmont, a white-truffle region, so he dealt with the suppliers.) When Newsweek mentioned that trufflemarket.com was selling white truffles for sixty dollars an ounce, compared with Dean & DeLuca’s hundred and six an ounce, business increased tenfold. “I was making thirty per cent on it and I thought it was great,” Brett says now. “I didn’t even know that was a small profit.” (He used the proceeds to open Club Iceberg, an all-ages night club run out of a freezer at a disused slaughterhouse that Arturo owned.) Brett remembers that Fareed Zakaria placed an order, as did Heath Ledger. Robert Mondavi began to use the Ottolenghi mushrooms for his truffle parties. But the Ottolenghis’ best customer was a young woman in Palm Beach, referred by the manager of the Palm Beach Country Club, who ordered a pound of white truffles a week for the entire season, September through December. She hated truffles, but a business associate of her father’s, an oil executive from Houston, liked to fly to Palm Beach for the weekends, and he expected to have a plate of them waiting on his bedside table. He ate them like apples.

In the food business, Brett found youth to be an inconvenience; he was constantly being threatened with expulsion from New York’s Fancy Food Show, which had an eighteen-and-over rule. Rather than present the Truffle Market as a father-son venture, as Arturo had hoped, Brett insisted that his father pose alone for the picture in their first catalogue. “To buy a truffle from a guy named Arturo Ottolenghi, that makes sense,” Brett says. “Not from Brett, who’s thirteen.” When he expanded the Truffle Market and renamed it Artisanal Foods, in 2008, he used an unsmiling picture of himself, wearing a suit jacket, a three-day beard, and a pair of fake eyeglasses, which he likes to wear for work, particularly when he’s meeting a chef for the first time. “I probably have twenty pairs,” he says.

For tenth grade, Brett went to St. Andrew’s, a boarding school in Delaware. To keep the Truffle Market going, he rented storage space from Arturo, and paid his employees to pack and ship. From school, he handled orders and did the bookkeeping. Soon, mushroom hunters all over the world were e-mailing him—Serbs and Croats and Chinese, primarily. Someone from Egypt sent him a box of the inexpensive, sandy desert truffles known as terfez. Foragers in Oregon sent him white truffles they had found, which he cooked up with scrambled eggs for the whole school. (The school cook was his closest friend; they once ordered an alligator, grilled it, and served it in the dining room.)

The Croatian truffles were a revelation: the same species as the rarest and most expensive white Italians—Tuber magnatum—but not subject to the hundred-per-cent tariff imposed on truffles entering the United States from the European Union. They became the Truffle Market’s main product. Brett left St. Andrew’s and finished high school at Mercersburg Academy, another boarding school, which was in Pennsylvania and closer to home. While there, he became an importer of Mogu pillows from Japan, and befriended local cheesemakers, who would deliver samples to his dorm room.

Ottolenghi moved to Las Vegas in 2004, to attend U.N.L.V.’s Harrah Hotel College. He stored truffles in his room, offending his hallmates with the smell, and kept his cell phone on vibrate while in class, to field orders. Carless, he walked up and down the Strip with a little basket of truffles and a scale, making unannounced visits to chefs at the best restaurants, and trying to talk them into buying an expensive luxury ingredient from a baby-faced, bespectacled nineteen-year-old freshman, sweating in his suit.

For most of Las Vegas’s history, food there broke down into three main categories: coffee shop, steak house, and buffet. For high rollers, there were gourmet rooms, with names like the Sultan’s Table and the House of Lords, where waiters in tuxedos plated Maine lobster and Chateaubriand tableside. Restaurants were a way of fortifying gamblers, to keep them from straying too far from the tables and the slot machines.

The first big chef to come to Las Vegas was Wolfgang Puck, who had opened Spago, in Los Angeles, in the early eighties. The developer Sheldon Gordon approached him with the idea of putting a Spago in the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace, a mall that he planned to build in a parking lot where Formula One races had been held. Puck, who liked to go to Vegas for the fights, and already had a branch of Spago in Tokyo, agreed, and the restaurant opened at the beginning of December, 1992, when the only thing happening in town were the rodeo finals. “We had all these people come up to the open kitchen—they’d see the plates and think it was a buffet,” Puck recalled. “I said, ‘I didn’t know they had so many cowboys here. I would’ve done a rib joint.’ ”

For the first several weeks, Puck thought he’d made a terrible mistake, and drank himself to sleep every night with a bottle of wine in front of the TV. Then New Year’s came, the shows resumed, and the Consumer Electronics convention came to town. Spago had lines out the door. Steve Wynn started hanging out at the bar, and so did the Molaskys, big local developers. Puck would see customers from the L.A. Spago at the fights—Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jack Nicholson, Tony Danza—and bring them back to Spago afterward. Before long, the Vegas location was outperforming L.A.’s. “People started hearing the numbers we were doing at Spago,” David Robins, the restaurant’s chef, who moved to Las Vegas to help with the opening, told me. “I’d get calls saying, ‘Did you really do a million this month?’ I’d say, ‘Actually, it was one-point-two.’ ”

In the late nineties, while getting ready to open the Bellagio, a $1.6-billion resort on the site of the old Dunes casino, Steve Wynn, mindful of Puck’s success, decided that the property needed to be a dining destination. He sent a team of consultants out to recruit celebrity chefs, and when the Bellagio opened, in 1998, it housed world-class restaurants by Sirio Maccioni, Michael Mina, Julian Serrano, Todd English, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Soon, every big casino had a roster of star chefs. Joël Robuchon came out of retirement to open Robuchon’s L’Atelier at the MGM Grand in 2005; last year, Pierre Gagnaire, a three-star Michelin chef in Paris, opened Twist, his first restaurant in the United States, at the Mandarin Oriental hotel at City Center. Now ten of the fifty top-grossing restaurants in the country are on the Strip, and there are more master sommeliers in Las Vegas than in any other city in the country. Adam Carmer, Steve Wynn’s first hotel sommelier and, as he told me, “the No. 1 maître d’ in town for a decade,” got to Las Vegas in 1993. He says, “Other places, you might have four or five extraordinary restaurants in a state or in a country; here you have four or five in a hotel. For shoes, you go to the mall—that’s what the food’s like out here.”

From the beginning, the problem with haute cuisine in Las Vegas was ingredients; the city, as most chefs will remind you, is in the desert, which meant frozen proteins and overstock produce. When Puck first arrived, he told me, “I went to visit a fish guy, who took me into a thirty-thousand-square-foot freezer. I said, ‘No, no. That’s not who we are. We want fresh tuna and salmon.’ ” He had his chefs drive a van to the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market for fruit and vegetables. As more and more high-level chefs arrived, a culture developed of what one chef called “FedEx cuisine.” Claude Le Tohic, the executive chef at Robuchon, who won the 2010 James Beard Award for best chef in the Southwest, gets his butter and his cheese overnighted from France. According to Julian Serrano, it is easier to get good ingredients in Las Vegas than in San Francisco, where he used to work, because the airport there often gets fogged in, whereas in Las Vegas the weather is almost always clear, and a plane lands every three minutes at McCarran Field.

Paul Bartolotta, the chef at Bartolotta at Wynn, a complex that Steve Wynn opened in 2005, is perhaps the most extreme example. The concept of his restaurant—simple preparations of fish and crustaceans at exorbitant prices—depends on seafood being flown in as often as five times a week from the Mediterranean, in coolers equipped with microchips to monitor the temperature throughout the voyage. He has no patience with concerns about sustainability. “Las Vegas is a pilot project to see if man can live on the moon,” he says. “There’s nothing local—our water comes from somewhere else, our electricity comes from somewhere else.” Fishermen have sent him texts in the middle of the night from their boats in the Adriatic, with pictures of themselves holding fresh-caught specimens and messages like “Want this fish?” On one such occasion, the fish was an eighteen-pound ombrina; when it arrived at the restaurant, forty-eight hours later, Bartolotta walked it onto the floor and offered it to a party of thirty golfers as the main course in a tasting menu they had ordered. He took it back to the kitchen, sprinkled some salt and pepper on it, tied up the tail so it would fit in the oven, and within ninety minutes the golfers were eating it. Their bill came to nearly five thousand dollars, before wine.

Another local feature is the wildly variable demand. Olivier Dubreuil, the executive chef at the Venetian and the Palazzo, which together command nearly two million square feet of convention space, says that he sometimes serves eighty thousand people one day and twenty thousand the next. “I can use five hundred magret and then never use them again,” he says. “I can use sixty pounds of foie gras in three days.” Even in the age of cutbacks, the pharmaceutical companies still spend handsomely. When Tylenol comes to town, he told me, food budgets soar.

Big players continue to get special service—ordering a plain cheese pizza at a formal French restaurant, for instance, as happened once at Alex. I heard a story about an Asian whale who travels twice a year to Wynn with an entourage of twenty-five, and plays six-figure hands of baccarat. One night, he tried Bartolotta and loved it so much that he arranged to bring his whole group back the following night. Only this time he was in the mood for a roast-beef dinner. So what did Bartolotta do? He went out and found some roast beef. Bradley Ogden recently bought from Ottolenghi two ounces of 1890 balsamic vinegar in tiny bottles that looked as if they should hold perfume; they cost three hundred and fifty dollars apiece, and would most likely be served to high rollers, after supper, on mother-of-pearl spoons. “Vegas is the entertainment capital of the world,” David Robins, of Spago, says. “We want to treat customers with respect, and we want to take all their money.”

Food purveying is a low-margin, high-volume business. It pays to be slick. Robert Moore, the executive chef at Jean Georges Steakhouse, told me about a couple of fast-talking local seafood venders, an Italian who looks Spanish and a Spaniard who looks Italian. “They have very raspy voices, like something out of a scene in a Mafia movie,” he said. “They do this bait-and-switch thing, telling you stories, and before you know it there’s a thousand pounds of tuna waiting at your back door.” Corruption is rampant. “The world Brett operates in, it’s a lot of back-door bullshit and making deals,” an old Vegas hand and a friend of Ottolenghi’s said. “You’ll have a food-and-beverage V.P. that goes with a certain purveyor because he says, ‘I’ll sell your crab legs on the buffet and write you a personal check for ten per cent of whatever we do. You’ll make two hundred and fifty grand because you sell two and a half million in crab.’ ”

“It’s very cutthroat,” Clint Arthur, a former actor, cabdriver, and raw-food enthusiast who is known as Las Vegas’s Butter Man, says. (He sells eighty-five-per-cent-butterfat butter to the chefs at Aureole, Payard, Jean Georges Steakhouse, and Guy Savoy, and once designed an extra-salty butter for David Werly, the executive chef at Le Cirque.) “The thing you have to understand is that food is a perishable item; it must be purchased, and someone is going to make money on it. These deals typically last for years, they’re worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and people resort to extreme measures, including sometimes illegal measures, to try to get clients. I’ve seen high-end chefs in Las Vegas fired for taking money under the table from suppliers.”

Las Vegas demands of its purveyors a level of show-business savvy. As the Butter Man, Arthur, who is also the author of a series of inspirational lectures on how to double your income, goes to chef meetings dressed in a button-down shirt in “butter yellow” and a pair of yellow Crocs. Most of the vegetable exotica in town comes from Lee Jones, who has a family farm in Huron, Ohio, where he raises rhubarb “the thickness of three pencil leads”; miniature cucumbers with tiny yellow blossoms; and heirloom champagne ice beets, for sorbets. His produce travels by FedEx, and can be served within twenty-four hours of harvest. When he comes to Las Vegas himself, he is Farmer Lee, and wears a uniform he has trademarked with the patent’s office: dark-blue overalls, white shirt, red bow tie. “It’s the authentic real deal,” he says. “Colonel Sanders has the white suit and the goatee. Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s, always wore a short-sleeve shirt. It gives us an identity.”

The city’s senior caviar purveyor is Barry Katcher—or Barry Beluga, as he calls himself—who has been selling to the casinos for more than twenty years. His family started in caviar in 1942, when his grandfather and great-uncle emigrated from Russia to Brooklyn. His great-uncle, a cobbler, sold it from a shoeshine box in front of a relative’s pharmacy. (He was called the Caviar Baron.) Caviar Royale, Katcher’s company, is, he says, the largest supplier to the hotel-casino industry in the United States. I went to see him—petite and deeply tanned, wearing black down to a pair of platform Skechers—at his retail store, on a stretch of Industrial Road behind Caesars Palace. His nickname, he said, originated with a radio personality whose show he used to call in to when he would make his runs to the airport at 3:30 A.M. “Once, I was sent an illegal shipment of caviar—the guys that got it got it illegally—and I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got seven cars around me with blue markings and their lights on.’ It was the F.D.A. They followed me back here and in front of them I opened twenty tins. It was all live on the air.” Katcher sees perfidy everywhere: two-faced purchasing agents, fake beluga, competitors who bribe buyers or—worse—milk him for information and then try to take his customers. “See all these knives in my back?” he said. When I mentioned that Ottolenghi had started representing caviar, he winced and said, “Piece of shit.”

The pitch that Ottolenghi makes is for integrity, a posture he communicates with unfashionable brown suits and brown leather shoes. “It’s a very specific look,” he says. “Almost professorial.” Being well, if humbly, dressed prevents him from being stopped by security while sneaking around the back corridors of casinos. Besides, light suits in Las Vegas say V.I.P. host, which doesn’t inspire the trust of chefs. He thinks of himself as an educator and a reformer—teaching chefs about the virtues of the products he is selling, not to mention what is wrong with the wares of his competitors—and prides himself on his bold moves. This spring, when he knew that Joël Robuchon would be in town (L’Atelier had ordered six of Ottolenghi’s bellota hams for a party for the chef), he dropped in on him, to present a Spanish caviar that he had recently added to his selection. “I just gave Chef Robuchon the caviar sample despite not having a meeting,” he wrote me in a gleeful text message. “Everyone was looking at me as if I had interrupted the Pope.”

Ottolenghi lives in a single-story stucco house he shares with his college roommate, Howie, who actually is a V.I.P. host, at Tao, the night club made famous by Tiger Woods and, with fourteen hundred covers on a peak night, the top-grossing restaurant in America. When I visited a few months ago, Ottolenghi was getting ready to open a small retail store, near the airport, where he hoped that chefs would shop on their days off. The living room was crowded with cannisters of Spanish olive oils, French green lentils, hand-kneaded fettuccine, specialty vinegar made by an ornery vintner in Napa, a huge bag of Szechuan peppercorns, and sixteen kinds of salt. In the kitchen cabinets, there were old balsamics and samples of water from all over the world, which Ottolenghi, researching for a special project, had tasted only after a twenty-four-hour fast. Four long chest freezers full of bone-in hams and foie-gras lobes lined the garage. The cream-colored 1951 Chevy panel truck, in which Sidney, the Artisanal Foods driver, makes deliveries, tends to be parked out front.

Beside the front door is a little pond, which was home to three sturgeon—pets, Ottolenghi said, that also served as props. Several weeks before, he bought a fish tank from a pet store, then called his domestic caviar supplier, in California, and asked if they could send him some sturgeon. He started going to chef meetings to pitch the Spanish caviar with one in tow. “He comes in with this fish tank sloshing water to show us what a sturgeon is,” Alessandro Stratta told me. “I said, ‘I know what a sturgeon is.’ Next time, he’ll come in here with a pig!” (Stratta placed an order.)

One morning, Ottolenghi went to the airport to pick up Helena Gonzalez, a beautiful twenty-seven-year-old Salvadoran woman whose parents started making foie gras in Sonoma in the mid-eighties, and a better prop by a long shot than a sturgeon in a tank. Their first appointment was at City Center, with Drew Terp, the executive chef at BarMasa and Shaboo, a pair of new restaurants by Masayoshi Takayama, whose New York flagship, Masa, has three Michelin stars. Wearing a brown suit, a Bic behind his ear, and a pair of glasses tucked into the neckline of his shirt, and carrying a foam cooler loaded with duck breasts and foie gras, Ottolenghi led Gonzalez across the hectic, dimly lit casino floor and around a corner to a fifteen-foot-tall locked door. Beside the locked door was another door, which he tested and found open. He let himself in, and sat down to wait for the chef. “It took me forever to find Masa,” he said later. “I kept hearing about it. I was, like, ‘There’s a new really expensive restaurant? How am I not working with them?’ ”

Eventually, Terp appeared, and took Ottolenghi and Gonzalez into the kitchen. “We use Hudson. That’s what Chef Masa likes best,” Terp, who is tall and fair, with full, rosy cheeks and a curl at his forehead, said. (Hudson, which is based in upstate New York and is one of two other domestic producers of foie gras, is Sonoma’s primary competitor.) “Chef Masa, when he finds something he likes, it’s very difficult to get him to use other things.” Ottolenghi extracted a big putty-colored lump from the cooler and handed it to Terp, who drew it close to his face and turned it over several times. Ottolenghi ventured that the feed used by Sonoma was, in his opinion, superior—cooked corn, with no added soy protein. Terp shaved off a tiny sliver of the lobe, and pressed it into a pan with his index finger. It started to sizzle. “We go through five to six lobes a week,” he said. “We do a five-hundred-dollar omakase menu, and I’ll use half a lobe for a five-top.”

Terp removed the piece of seared foie gras with a pair of chopsticks, and set in on a cutting board. He tasted it; he liked it; price, he said, was no object. “I have to run it by Chef Masa,” he said. “He’s very demanding. I’ll have to go through the whole lobe to make sure of the consistency.” Ottolenghi asked if he could visit the following week, when the chef was in. “Sure,” Terp said. “But it’s just him tasting it and saying yes or no. No sales pitch, no talking about sustainability.”

A relative of mine who lived in Buffalo and went by the name Shorty Plumb used to run booze across the border to Canada in the back of a pickup truck loaded with horse manure, and never got caught. Truffle cheats follow that same rule of thumb: you hide the good stuff in with the shit. The sums of money involved can be vast. White truffles from Italy cost up to forty-five hundred dollars a pound wholesale; black ones, eight hundred. Claude Le Tohic, Robuchon’s executive chef, told me that when truffles are in season he goes through ten or twelve pounds of black ones and five pounds of white a week. For an importer, the temptation to con can be strong. Some will stash a box of truffles deep inside a container load of something boring, like lettuce, to dodge the import tax. Others route their paperwork through places not within the bounds of the E.U. For years, Ottolenghi says, all the European truffle companies were based in San Marino, a tiny independent republic in northern Italy, which was exempt; now most run their paperwork through Croatia.

Another common trick, this one played on chefs, is to add a few worthless Chinese truffles to a box of black Italians; the color is indistinguishable, and the Chinese truffles take on the aroma of the more expensive ones. A chef would have to know the subtleties of truffle morphology to pick out the impostors, or isolate each truffle under a bell jar and smell it again after waiting fifteen minutes. Ottolenghi finds the chicanery infuriating; crooks serve as good foils for virtue, but they make for tough competition in the marketplace. “Basically, selling truffles, you’re a smuggler,” he says. Joseph Magnano, the young, tattooed West Coast representative for Sabatino Tartufi, a large importer based in Umbria, and the top truffle seller in Las Vegas, is dismissive of Ottolenghi’s point of view. “It’s not that the business has no ethics—it’s a business,” he said. “If you don’t move product, you don’t live.” He says that you can tell a Chinese truffle by its smell, of burned drip coffee.

In February, Ottolenghi sent a letter to his chefs, announcing that, after twelve years, he was scaling down his truffle business, “because the only way to succeed selling truffles in Las Vegas is to have lower ethics and cheat more than your competitors.” He went on to say that saffron, “a once noble spice,” was going the same way, and claimed that not a single restaurant in Las Vegas was using pure product. Most of the saffron on the market—sold for eighty-five dollars an ounce—was, he claimed, a hash of crocus parts dyed with red food coloring. He, on the other hand, was personally importing saffron directly from Spain. The letter served as an announcement that his fresh shipment had arrived, and that he would be offering it for a hundred and forty-five dollars an ounce.

While in Spain in May, Ottolenghi went to see the producers at Pina, the firm in La Mancha whose saffron he has been importing for several years. (“Saffron is the second product I started selling, after truffles,” he told me. “Light products do well on the Internet.”) Pina has a lab where it analyzes competitors’ saffron to suss out fakes, and Ottolenghi thought that this would be a selling point to chefs: they’d give him a one-gram sample of whatever they were using, he’d pay to have it tested at Pina, and if it turned out to be dyed the chefs would promise to buy from him. “I know I’m going to win that bet,” he said.

Several weeks after he got home, Ottolenghi was back on his beat, going from chef to chef, a brown leather satchel slung over his shoulder, hand-selling his goods: hundred-per-cent-pure saffron; vanilla bean from Papua New Guinea; and a variety of salts, including one that had been smoked over a Chardonnay cask. It was a hundred and sixteen degrees, and, to his embarrassment, he couldn’t wear a suit. Furthermore, his sturgeon had died, and Chef Robuchon had said no to the Spanish caviar. But SW Steakhouse had just ordered a kilo, for fifteen hundred dollars; BarMasa was using the foie gras; and RM Seafood, Rick Moonen’s sustainable fish restaurant at Mandalay Bay, had picked up both.

At midday, Ottolenghi trudged into the Rio, an old casino that houses the purchasing department for all the Harrah’s properties in Las Vegas. He wound his way past giant carnival masks and fixated smokers staring at the slots, and through an unmarked door to the loading dock, where crates of plucked chickens sat waiting next to plastic bags of chili. In a windowless office off the dock, he sat down to make a pitch to David Cortes, a senior buyer. “I’m trying to convince everyone to switch to real saffron,” Ottolenghi said. “It’s terrible. There’s more cheating going on in saffron than almost any other product.” He pulled a jar from his satchel, and took off the top. A heady, tobacco-like aroma filled the room. He held up a piece, bright red, like a shrunken coral. “The fake ones, you put them in water, the water will turn orange-red from dye,” he said. Cortes pushed a pair of glasses up onto his forehead. “Interesting,” he said. “Never knew that.” Ottolenghi leaned in eagerly, and suggested that he could do a demonstration for the chefs, soaking the saffron from their stockrooms in water to show them what they really had: flavorless flower bits and food coloring. Cortes agreed, and Ottolenghi packed up his wares and said goodbye. But, rather than leaving, he started walking down the hall, popping his head into other buyers’ offices, just to introduce himself and say hello and see if they might like to take a sniff of his vanilla from Papua New Guinea, which was the same species and just as good, for his money, as the prized Tahitian stuff, and a bargain by comparison. ♦

Dana Goodyear, a staff writer, was on the editorial staff of The New Yorker from 1999 to 2007, when she began writing full time for the magazine.